If there is a single word that sums up Intopia’s most recent financial year, that word must be “growth”. In the year ended 30 June 2018, Intopia experienced growth – in numbers.

Now, numbers are not the entire measure of a company’s growth, but they can give an idea of the scale and speed of a company’s development.

The Numbers

Our Team almost doubled in size from five to nine.

Our Clients almost tripled in number from 13 to 34.

Our Services expanded as our range of auditing, testing and assessment services grew to meet client demand; and we launched an entirely new service, Intopia Connect.

Our Revenue more than doubled – enough said.

Our Social Commitment saw us increase our financial contributions to community based organisations and providers of services to people with disability: it’s how we give back.

Our Local Outreach was evident in presenting at a record 20+ meetups, conferences and workshops across five Australian capital cities.

Our International Outreach grew through our active membership of the W3C Education and Outreach Working Group and our team of three (the largest Australian contingent) who attended the iconic CSUN conference in the USA.

Our Sponsorships increased as we provided more financial, in-kind and volunteer support for community-based support networks like A11y Bytes (meetups in a record five cities this year) and A11y Camp (more attendees than ever in 2017).

There are some impressive statistics in there but, as we said, numbers aren’t everything.

Beyond the Numbers

To get a more rounded view of Intopia’s financial year we asked Managing Director Stewart Hay, one of Intopia’s three co-founders, how he saw the year.

“To me, the numbers are just an indicator that we are on the way to achieving our primary goal, which is to contribute actively and directly to making the digital world more accessible to people with disability.”

“We do that by helping other people make their products and services accessible. That’s why we exist, and any success we have should be measured in those terms.”

“For example, in the past financial year we helped several government agencies and departments with their accessibility needs, including the Digital Transformation Agency, the Australian Taxation Office, the Department of Human Services and the Department of Industry.”

“These are key deliverers of Government services that must be made accessible to people with disability – and we help them to do that.”

“We also partnered with a number of emerging agencies who understand they need to meet the accessibility needs of their Australian and international clients, and we also helped some of Australia’s leading online services companies including Seek, REA Group, CultureAMP and SafetyCulture.”

“We are also still seeing the vast majority of our work coming directly from referral or returning clients. For me, this speaks volumes about our reputation and the quality of service we are providing.”

Social success

“In terms of our stated commitment to plough 5% of our revenue back into the community, this year we were able to increase our contribution to each of our beneficiaries from the previous financial year. In addition to that, we were able to also provide support to a couple of new organisations.”

“Based on the number of those beneficiaries who contacted us to check we hadn’t made a mistake with the size of the donation we made, we seem to be punching above our weight in that regard.”

“And it was frankly nice to hear back from one organisation who said there were only three companies that provided more money than we did – and they included Microsoft and Google. Not bad company to be keeping.”

Spreading the message

“We really encourage everyone in our team to make an effort to get out and talk about the importance of accessibility and inclusive design and to share their knowledge. I honestly believe we are making one of the biggest impacts in Australia around raising awareness of the importance of accessibility and inclusion.”

“At the same time, we want to encourage other accessibility-aware web professionals to share their knowledge, so we increased our support for the A11y Bytes meetups this year – it ran in five cities this year and involved over 200 people, as well as tapping into an international audience.”

“A11y Camp 2017 in Sydney, with 150 attendees, was the largest accessibility conference in Australia. I had the honour of being the Master of Ceremonies and the feedback from the other sponsors and the attendees was nothing short of fantastic. And we’re going to help make it even better in 2018. ”

The team

“With the growth in our business it’s not surprising our team continued to grow. In 2017-2018, we added four amazing new people to our team: Andrew Arch, Ricky Onsman, Jessica King and Chris Pigden.”

“Even then, we’ve been so inundated with work that we also engaged a couple of very experienced, trusted contractors who were able to help us during a very busy end to the financial year.”

“I don’t have any doubt that the new financial year will see us continue to grow. Our aim remains to make the digital world accessible, and there is a lot of work yet to be done to reach that goal.”

“We intend to continue to make a real impact by helping our clients put accessibility into practice, by advocating for and explaining how to implement inclusive design, and by giving back to the community – showing, in the process, why Australians are accessibility world leaders.”